No new Government inherits a clean slate, and in foreign policymaking few are bold enough to wipe it clean. For the Labour
Government in 1945 both the domestic and external pressures
for continuity were remarkable. Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin,
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary respectively after 26 July
1945, were already in office, playing important roles in the
wartime Coalition Government and involved in high-level
discussions about the shape of the postwar world. They then took
over the reins of power while the critical Heads of State meeting
at Potsdam was still in progress. This critical turning-point
between war and peace was no time to review British policy.

It was not initially expected that Bevin would become Foreign
Secretary, and he himself had anticipated going to the Treasury.
But he was preferred for the Foreign Office because, it seems,
he was less openly anti-German, less left-wing, and more of a
political heavyweight than his rival, Hugh Dalton. Attlee later
remarked that he thought 'affairs were going to be pretty difficult
and a heavy tank was what was going to be required rather than
a sniper'. Bevin was also preferred by senior Foreign Office officials
because Dalton had a reputation of being opinionated, as
well as sympathetic to Soviet claims against the defeated Reich. Certainly, Foreign Office Permanent Under-Secretary, Sir Alexander Cadogan, felt that 'we may do better with Bevin than
with any of the other Labourites'.1

Both in the Soviet Union and in the United States the election
victory was viewed with some concern. The Labour Party's

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